> Can you expand on your spreadsheet analogy?
Sure.
(I've been coding long enough that what Joel writes about there just seems obvious to me: of course it happened like that, how else would it have?)
So, a spreadsheet in the general sense — not necessarily compatible with Microsoft's, but one that works — is quite simple to code. Precisely because it's easy, that's not something you can sell directly, because anyone else can compete easily.
And yet, Microsoft Office exists, and the Office suite is basically a cost of doing businesses. Microsoft got to be market-dominant enough to build all that complexity that became a moat, that made it hard to build a clone. Not the core tech of a spreadsheet, but everything else surrounding that core tech.
OpenAI has a little bit of that, but not much. It's only a little because while their API is cool, it's so easy to work with that you can (I have) asked the original 3.5 chat model to write its own web UI. As it happens, mine is already out of date, because the real one can better handle markdown etc., so the same sorts of principles apply, even on a smaller scale like this where it's more of "keeping up in real time" rather than "349 page PDF file just to get started".
OpenAI is iterating very effectively and very quickly with all the stuff around the LLM itself, the app, the ecosystem. But so is Anthropic, so is Apple, so is everyone — the buzz across the business world is "how are you going to integrate AI into your business?", which I suspect will go about the same as when it was "integrate the information superhighway" or "integrate apps", and what we have now in the business world is to the future of LLMs as Geocities was to the web: a glorious chaotic mess, upon which people cut their teeth in order to create the real value a decade later.
In the meantime, OpenAI is one of several companies that has a good chance of building up enough complexity over time to become an incumbent by a combination of inertia and years of cruft.
But also only a good chance. They may yet fail.
> On the other hand, people don't have extremely specific expectations for LLMs because 1) they're fairly new and 2) they're almost always nondeterministic anyway. They don't care so much about using the same one as everyone they know or work with, because there's no network aspect of the product.
For #1, I agree. That's why I don't want to bet if OpenAI is going to be to LLMs what Microsoft is to spreadsheets, or if they'll be as much a footnote to the future history of LLMs as Star Division was to spreadsheets.
For #2, network effects… I'm not sure I agree with you, but this is just anecdotal, so YMMV: in my experience, OpenAI has the public eye, much more so than the others. It's ChatGPT, not Claude, certainly not grok, that people talk about. I've installed and used Phi-3 locally, but it's not a name I hear in public. Even in business settings, it's ChatGPT first, with GitHub Copilot and Claude limited to "and also", and the other LLMs don't even get named.